Saturday, 29 April 2017

More Fictional Geography

There is a clear literary allusion here:

"...an unremarkable face that looked distorted, somehow, without being in any way abnormal if you considered it feature by feature.
"'We should push on to Innsmouth...'"
-SM Stirling, The Sunrise Lands (New York, 2008), Chapter Five, p. 88.

The Emberverse Earth was not identical with ours even before the Change because its geography included a Lovecraftian town. This is comparable to Sherlock Holmes as a real person in the Time Patrol universe.

Both Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore have written Lovecraftian stories but I am glad that Poul Anderson did not. Horror fiction can have a transcendent quality and can say something about life but the Lovecraftian sub-genre has its limits.